A Denver park survey found native pollinator life in plain sight

Walk through a Denver park and you see lawns, shade trees, and a playground. Move slower, the way a team of surveyors did across three summer 2023 stretches in 25 parks, and a far busier picture comes into focus. Their field work turned up 143 bee species and 33 butterfly species living in those ordinary public spaces.

What makes that count striking is how much of it had gone unrecorded. Thirty-six of the bee species were the first time anyone had documented them anywhere in Denver County. They had been here, foraging in flower beds and along park edges, before anyone wrote them down.

A number like that changes how a park reads. The small native planting near the path, the strip of grass left a little long, the bed of coneflowers by the parking lot are not just landscaping. They are pieces of a larger habitat network stitched through the city, the kind of place a native bee can actually use.

It also explains a choice you may have noticed and wondered about. Denver Parks manages some areas with less routine mowing and more attention to native vegetation, habitat, and water quality, which can look untidy next to a clipped lawn. The pollinator count gives that approach a living cast of characters: bees and butterflies that depend on exactly the kind of rough, flowering edges a tidy mowing schedule would erase.